Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson’s chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company’s manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. “The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier,” he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.

It isn’t the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service have come knocking at the storied maker of such iconic instruments as the Les Paul electric guitar, the J-160E acoustic-electric John Lennon played, and essential jazz-boxes such as Charlie Christian’s ES-150. In 2009 the Feds seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been wrangling over the goods in a case with the delightful name “United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms.”

There has never been a satisfactory explanation for the government’s aggressive behavior toward Gibson. The “crime” they were accused of involved using a specific type of wood to make guitars. It hardly demanded fully armed tactical teams swooping into the guitar maker’s factory. The factory had been there for decades, and wood is heavy. There was no flight or fight risk. But the two raids were very intimidating.

There was a dual agenda at work, involving union and foreign labor. The administration crucified Gibson, to use the EPA’s lingo, to promote that agenda via fear. To make an example out of Gibson. The “crime” of using the wrong wood served merely as the excuse to hang the non-union, GOP supporting guitar maker on a prosecutorial cross.

Did the feds build their cross out of illegal ebony? Who would prosecute them if they did?

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

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1.
Jeff B

This EPA official has revealed far more than his personal agenda and we would be wise to look deeper into this Pandora’s Box which Obama himself has opened up. The administration is a large-scale intimidation machine that operates to “kill the chicken to scare the monkey” as the Chinese say. The Roman example of crucifixion has been updated by the Communists.

“Chinese dissidents are extraordinarily brave and thoughtful, but a Chinese Communist Party aphorism refers to them as chickens. Presumably said chickens are harder to kill than monkeys, which is why the reported saying advocates slaughtering the one to intimidate the other. Whether they are “guilty” or not, hardly matters.”